Sawada Coffee

Sawada Inside Au Cheval Is One of NYC’s Most Inspired Coffee Openings in Years | Eater NY

"Arriving in New York inside the lobby of Au Cheval in Tribeca, this latte-focused outpost named for founder Hiroshi Sawada channels the Streamer Coffee sensibility with heavy personal branding — a ghostly mural of Sawada looms over the space and his visage peers out from skateboard decks pinned to the dark wood walls. The coffee is roasted domestically by Metropolis in Chicago in a Tokyo-dark style: pitch-black, bitter and smoky but extremely smoothed out rather than acrid. I generally find it preferable to the dense, bone-dry espresso that dominated New York previously, and I think you should probably stick to the milk drinks for which such black-hole-dark coffee is suited. The best offerings are the more adulterated, baroque creations: the signature military latte (made with matcha and dusted with cocoa powder) and the black camo latte (made with hojicha), the latter tasting simultaneously nutty and floral without being too sweet. You can add kuromitsu (a Japanese black sugar syrup described as “Tokyo style”) to any drink, but it’s a blast of sweetness that can obliterate lighter beverages (it ruined a cappuccino for me), so I’d stick to adding it to high-milk drinks like an iced latte. Overall, Sawada is one of the most genuinely inspired additions to the New York coffee scene in some time and signals a shift toward more crafted, combo-style specialty lattes." - Matt Buchanan